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Archive for April, 2008

How to Attract the People You Need

Apr 29

Posted by Jenny Stilwell in Growth, Human Resource Management, Leadership, Planning, Starting out in business, The Operations Dept | No Comments

Just because you select an ideal recruit for your business, doesn’t mean they will automatically want to work for you. Why not?

Many businesses overlook the fact that they have to sell their offer and make it an attractive option for prospective new employees.

If you operate in a competitive environment where good recruits are scarce, or when you are trying to attract very high calibre people, it is essential that you make your business, and the position, sound as appealing as possible.

Here are some factors to consider:
1. Consider what drives people to join new companies. They typically want:
a. a new challenge
b. more money
c. opportunities for promotion
d. to work in a larger company
e. to work in a smaller company environment
f. to work closer to home
g. to work in an environment where they can improve their skills and learn
h. to work in a company full of friendly people
i. to work for a market leader
j. a manager who will spend time with them to teach and mentor

Does your business offer any of these enticements?

2. If it doesn’t, you may have issues with how the business is structured, or how it is performing, and may need to make some internal assessments and adjustments before you are able to attract the kind of people you need and want.

3. If you do meet some of these criteria, then the next question is, how do you sell your business and the position to the candidate? At every point possible!

a. The advertisement
i. Outline what’s positive and different about your company
ii. Make it sound interesting
iii. Provide several ways to respond to the advertisement (email, phone call, fax) – it appears more professional
b. Your website
i. Presentation – professional or amateurish?
ii. Overview of your business – should provide reasonable detail
iii. Clients – some reference to clients is a positive indicator
c. The interview
i. Reception and greeting – friendly, and again, professional
ii. Positive interaction – encourage questions at the end
iii. Be animated when interviewing and talking about your business
iv. You and the company must reflect the culture (professional/casual, committed, creative, service focus etc.)
d. Follow up
i. Needs to be a fast turnaround if you want the person
ii. Well organised – timeliness, information in the offer

If you do all of these things it is more than likely that you will be able to employ a candidate who matches your requirements, and the culture of your company. Good luck!

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How to be a great coach.

Apr 25

Posted by Steve Gray in Excellence!, Leadership, People!, Personal Development | No Comments

Firstly.. Why be a coach?

You would not expect your favourite sports team to be effective without a coach… nor would you expect the people you lead to be effective without a leader.

To get high-level productivity from the team your role as a leader takes in a great deal of coaching and mentoring skills. Therefore your aim should be, to be the best coach you can be.

How to be a great coach

Here are some great points on what makes a great coach, take a look a them and decide which of these skills you already have and which ones you may need to work on.

  • Love people – Great coaches know they are leading people in a great cause of some kind and that the value of that is very high, to get the most out of the team and therefore the task at hand they know that people will be the device that makes the task happen. If the coach loves people they will then find ways to enhance their teams skills to be all they can be. To do so they have to love people after all it’s all they have to get the job done.
  • Motivate them – If you want the best out of people yo need to motivate them in ways that inspire them to do great things, to go the extra mile and see the results of their efforts and be pleased with them. Motivation is NOT driving them, yelling and screaming, pushing them hard, its more about finding ways to encourage them to find those things in themselves if they need to.
  • Be a coach – Being a coach might even entail you putting on a coach’s hat, then working with your people. Consider this, what if you had a team meeting and you did just that, put on a hat that said coach. It would probably lighten the mood and let the team know you are coaching them, providing support, motivation, guidance and the skills to encourage them.
  • Get their opinions and thoughts – Why should you be the one with all the ideas? Let the team use their collective intelligence to explore more effective ways of doing what they do. You might just get a lot more than you thought.
  • Explore mistakes – In learning to walk you stood up and fell down a few times until it all came together, after a while the bruises, scratches and scrapes healed and you explored walking some more, no one said you couldn’t do it did they?

    Mistakes therefore are just opportunities to learn and grow and you need to ensure that in the pursuit of better outcomes that the more mistakes the team makes should therefore mean they are pushing the boundaries further to discover better ways to get results.

  • Be a great communicator – Listen a lot and when you speak or write make it elegant and effective. You will also want to be asking great questions so you can get great answers and allow you people to be all they can be.
  • Know there are differences and work with them – We are all different. A great coach will be aware of this and find ways to connect effectively with all people despite their differences.
  • Empower people – You have a team, how do you want them to do things? To their full potential or less? The answer HAS to be full potential anything else is a cop out. Therefore it is your solemn duty to find out how to empower them, and keep looking for ways to take it further.
  • Solve challenges and problems together – As a coach you may ask questions, which are more about how to solve challenges and problems, than telling them how to do things.
  • Keep meetings effective – Get to the point and stay on track with the agenda, get very strict about the meeting structure, that way you can sort things out better. Any chace you get, train your team rather than merely meet with them.
  • Work on the positive and reward the behaviour you want – Who wants to push a “negative barrow” about? After all it’s hard and like an uphill trudge, the more you push the heavier the barrow gets and the steeper the incline. When it’s positive you might just find the barrow carries you for significant parts of the ride, with the team taking it in turn to push.
  • Be an advocate for your people – As much as your team “puts in” to get results, be sure and back them up if the need arises. If they need a reference do it. If they need support in dealing with other issues at work do it. Be there for them, after all they are there for you and the tasks at hand, the pay off will be a team of truly committed people wanting to readily go the extra mile.
  • Self edit – As a coach your commitment to being all you can be will mean you are leading by example. Before long you will be seeking out every opportunity to hone your skills in all aspects of being a coach and editing yourself to get better results.

Give your team the edge

Apr 22

Posted by Steve Gray in Human Resource Management, Leadership, People! | No Comments

If you want to run a business that has a team with real power in what they do I have one piece of advice, in fact I will give you a really easy way to take that advice and put it into action… ready?

Coach them… too simple eh? but it works, you be the coach and say to yourself “If I am going to be a coach and asisst my team to be all they can be then I need to know about being the best coach I can be…” so lets grab that notion for a moment and run with it.

So to put the notion into action, grab a writing implement… now jot down as many attributes you would like a fantastic coach to have… write fast, write now, and go for a really long list. If someone comes past your door grab their attention (not by throwing a writing implement at them you need that…) and ask them for three really top attributes they would want to see in a coach.

Do you have a good list with over 15 attributes on it? Okay so now tick the attributes  you already have and run a line through any of the points that are to do with yelling at people, and otherwise negatively driving them to perform.

Over the next few days keep the exercise happening in your mind and search for more things to add to the list,  your list.

Now work on it, take all the positive qualities and do your best to tweak them and put them into practice.

Want to go further? Start  your own coaching journal with all the attributes listed in the front of the journal and jot down notes on how  you went and what you did to introduce these points into your own personal style of doing things. before long you will be finding great ways to work with people and get even greater results!

Happy coaching :)

What’s important to you?

Apr 8

Posted by Steve Gray in Excellence!, Growth, Innovation and Creativity, People!, Personal Development | No Comments

This might seem like the sort of question that might be more suited to a personal development blog or professional development series of some kind, but I felt the issue was of burning intrigue for me so here it is.

It’s of interest to me because I see so many businesses, and as I spend time analysing, pushing and pulling ideas, it becomes one of the key things I ask as a business support person “What’s important to you?”… Invariably I don’t get the responses I want from people as they hedge about on the issue and use all manner of creative avoidance to try and get around it… to no avail I come back to it time and time again.

So what is the question based on and why is this question so important (to me initially and then the client…)

I see people putting in LONG hours, building a business (often from scratch…) and getting to a point of exhaustion (mentally and or physically) and they ask, “Does everyone in business do this?” big question, small answer “no…” So the question is based on what are they getting out of the business (for the effort they put in). Then, is the output worth it in real terms… and so to the importance of what they are doing.

For me the question starts to give me a sense of what the people are doing and if it is really of value. To them and to the people they set out to serve (customers and their staff).

At the top of the “melting pot of concepts” here, is the notion of values (what’s important) followed by the notion of their beliefs. Beliefs seem to underpin values and are therefore vital for us to discover more about what makes this person tick and how I might best serve them to get more effective outcomes.

For you as the business person wanting to develop more ways to add value, create excellent service, be faster to market, be more profitable and so on, I suggest the values you seek are vital, as are the beliefs that support them and without some understanding of them you can not expect much to happen in your business other than marking time and hoping for the best. make a list of the things you value and then check out what you believe about them so you can chart a more effective path on the road to making your business all  you want it to be.

The connection…

Apr 2

Posted by Steve Gray in Excellence!, Leadership, People!, Planning | No Comments

Your business is all it can be due to a few factors and often it boils down to how people connect, customers to staff, staff to staff and any other stakeholders you may have in the equation.

You see it’s about your values and beliefs and theirs, if you are employing staff it is important for the business to connect (If there is no connection it’s like having one computer off a network and expecting someone to be able to work with it but of course they have no access to info and resources, so how can they.) To connect you need to be able to say what values and beliefs you have and how you are going to match those with the employee you want to hire.

It also works with customers and clients, get the right ‘connection’ and you are probably on the same ‘wave length’ as an ideal customer.

Take the time to figure out what is important to you so you can find out if they are on the same wavelength. The connection can be well worth it in the long run.

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